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Wednesday, October 24, 2012

31 Days of Halloween 2012: The Abominable Dr. Phibes

An appreciation by Bob Ignizio

I'm always hesitant to name a
“favorite” movie. There are so many films I enjoy a great deal
for different reasons, even when the question gets narrowed down to a
particular genre, that I simply don't have a definitive answer.
Hypothetically, though, if some disfigured madman back from the grave
had constructed a devious deathtrap and placed me in it, my only hope
for escape being to give an honest answer to this question since any
hint of a lie would set off the trap and kill me instantly, I think I
could survive by saying THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES.

PHIBES
is one of a small handful of movies I feel compelled to revisit at
least once a year. It's not because I think it's the best movie ever
made, or even the best horror movie ever made, but there are few
films, horror or otherwise, as much fun to watch.

Set
in 1925 England, the film begins with Dr. Anton Phibes (Vincent
Price) sitting at his majestic organ clad in a black hooded cloak. As
he plays, the organ rises into an art deco wonderland populated by
mechanical musicians (Dr. Phibes' “Clockwork Wizards”, as the
name on their bass drum head informs us). Then through a splendidly
decorated doorway a brilliant light shines, heralding the arrival of
the exotic beauty Vulnavia (Virginia North). As the Clockwork Wizards
strike up a tune, Phibes and Vulnavia take time out for a dance
before heading out into the night for the first of their carefully
planned and highly unusual murders, this one involving bats.

The victim, a
prominent doctor, is discovered the next morning by his butler. The
police are called in and Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) arrives on
the scene. He is utterly baffled to find a room full of furry flying
mammals that ought to be in South America, not England. After two
more physicians die in bizarre ways, Trout finally starts to put the
clues together. He discovers that all the murdered men worked with a
Dr. Vesalius (Joseph Cotton), and thanks to an amulet left behind at
the scene of the most recent crime, it becomes apparent that the
murders are being staged in such a way as to represent the 10 plagues
visited by God upon the Pharaohs in the Old Testament. From there
Trout figures out who the remaining victims will be, but can he reach
them in time to save them from the vengeful Phibes?

When listing off
the things that make this film so much fun, one has to begin with
Price himself. The majority of his performance here is pantomime, his
character having suffered horrible injuries in a car crash that left
him mute and disfigured, much of his face painstakingly recreated in
unmoving wax. Phibes occasionally “talks” in a slow, halting
monotone using a clever device that allows him to plug a gramophone
into his neck, but for the most part his actions speak louder than
words. One might think that an actor so closely associated with his
voice would be hampered by these restrictions, but Price conveys
everything he needs to with the slight raise of an eyebrow or tilt of
the head, imbuing these slight movements with his trademark mix of
macabre mirth and menace.

Like all the best
monsters, Phibes manages to elicit our sympathy even as he does
horrible things. He may be absolutely off his rocker insane, and his
campaign of murder wholly unjustified, but he sincerely believes
himself to be the wronged party and commits his acts of evil out of
love for his deceased wife. At the same time, all the victims come
off as arrogant and unlikeable, and the police are all utterly
incompetent. It's almost impossible not to root for Phibes. Of all
the film's would-be “heroes”, only Joseph Cotton's Dr. Vesalius
comes close to getting the audience on his side.

THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES
doesn't so much “hold up” over time as exist outside of it. It
truly does create its own world, drawn partly from French pulp
stories like Gaston
Leroux's Phantom
of the Opera
and Marcell Allain and Pierre
Souvestre's Fantomas,
but filtered through the imagination of
director Robert Feust, who was responsible for the film's darkly
comic tone. He also had a background in set design and collaborated
with credited set designer Brian Eatwell to give the film its truly
distinctive look. The result is a film world that bears almost no
resemblance to any reality past or present. In fact everything about
this movie seems designed to create a feeling of unabashed fantasy,
anathema to those who believe movies are always supposed to be
realistic. It's their loss.

Note:
pretty much all of the background/behind the scenes information that
informs this article came from The
Irreplaceable Mr. Fuest
by Justin Humphreys in Video
Watchdog #168.

3 comments:

I found a great appreciation of PHIBES in "How to Wreck a Nice Beach," a quirky book on voice-synthesizers in music, war and culture. A couple of pioneer hip-hop dudes say that because Phibes connects his ruined larynx to a turntable to speak, he can be considered hip-hop. In fact, maybe his name is code for "Dr. Vibes." ...But why didn't the Clockwork Wizards defend the mansion with tommy guns like they were supposed to?

Check out the new all-Phibes issue of Little Shoppe of Horrors (#29), Bob. It contains, among other Phibes-related articles, my 30-page making-of article on The Abominable Dr. Phibes. I share your deep affection for the film.